15

They reconvened in the offices at Hipposync. There was a lot of euphoria in the air, and Matt lost count of the number of times his back was slapped, he was high-fived, or variations of the words “horse” and “dark” were hurled at him. Everyone was treated to one of Mrs. Hoblip’s full-English breakfasts, except for Kylah, who ate something that looked like grey sawdust with yoghurt.

Yet even while he ate—and the food was, once again, astonishingly good—Matt couldn’t shrug off a feeling of vague anxiety hanging over him like damp fog. It was almost four PM on a Sunday afternoon in late January, and the light was beginning to die outside. It had only been nine hours since they’d left that very room to enter the baked-bean tin that was Uzturnsitstan, yet Matt felt like a year had passed. He glanced out of the window and saw Rimsplitter trying to catch rats on the canal bank.

“Are you sure he doesn’t look too conspicuous?” Matt asked.

“Put on your sexy glasses,” Birrik said through a mouthful of toast.

Matt slid on the lens-less specs. Instantly, Rimsplitter became a very fierce and weather-beaten black and white tomcat. The type you did not want to mess with, judging by the bits of anatomy he was missing.

“An interesting fellow, your vulture,” Mr. Porter said as he followed Matt’s gaze.

“Yes. He’s very…special.”

Mr. Porter, having cleaned the egg and fat off his plate with a slice of bread, looked none the worse for his ordeal, although he had yawned a few times and was getting more restless by the minute.

“Well, I think I’d better be getting along,” he said, making a great show of looking at his watch. “Mrs. Porter, if she has not done so already, will undoubtedly notice my absence very shortly, as it is fast approaching G&T time.” He laughed amiably and levered himself out of the chair with difficulty. Matt stood, too, and noticed that Birrik and Kemoch were standing to attention. Mr. Porter clutched Matt’s hand.

“I’m not sure what the consequences might have been if those Ghoulshee rapscallions had had their way today. I daresay someone would have called in my brothers.” Mr. Porter shook his head. “And you know what family gatherings are like, especially when revenge is on the menu.” He winked. “We’re all very grateful to you, Mathew. Knew you were a good one soon as I set eyes on you. Kylah here will take care of you. Now, where is that door?”

Birrik opened the door, and Mr. Porter ambled out after kissing Kylah chastely on the cheek. The two SES followed on his heels.

“Ah, I have chaperones, I see. Perhaps we could have a song or two as we go, eh, gentlemen?”

Matt saw a fleeting exchange between the two Sith Fand in which he read dread anticipation. A muscle began clenching and unclenching in Birrik’s jaw.

“Now,” said Mr. Porter, “how about that one about the yellow submersible, how does it go? Oh, or how about that Scottish one, I’ve been a wild roamer, no—it’s not roamer, but it is a dog’s name…um, Rex, isn’t it? Had a dog called Rex once. Excellent for keeping away the kelpie, you know. Of course, you don’t get kelpie in Scotland any more, so why they bothered writing a song about it, I don’t know…”

The front door of Hipposync slammed shut and Matt and Kylah were alone.

“So,” Matt said after a long few seconds, “who’s going first, you or me?”

Kylah opened her mouth to speak, decided against it with a frown, and then said, “You. But wait just one minute. I better make a note of all of this for DC Farmer’s records.”

She reached into a drawer and pulled out a small leatherbound book with very thick pages. It looked a bit like one of those recycled paper diaries you found in shops that sold expensive fountain pens. Kylah noticed his stare and said, “Special parchment. Self-scribing.”

“Two and a half scruples from Wellworths, I know.”

Her eyes widened in surprise, but all she said was “Okay. We’re good to go.”

It didn’t take that long, and she didn’t interrupt him much, but she did want details of Jock the Reaper and the shell and pea game, as well as making Matt repeat all of that twice. Matt was fascinated by the way the pages of the little book filled with words as he spoke. Of course, it was bloody miraculous if you stopped to think about it, but then there was such a thing as voice recognition software, too. When he ended with a description of the mini-earthquake that Kylah herself had witnessed, he thought he could see a slight softening around her eyes.

“Right, that’s me,” he said. “Now, I need it all explained.”

“Explained, yes,” Kylah said, looking everywhere but at Matt. “It’s difficult to know where to begin.”

Matt stared at her in exasperation. “Really? Well, let me help you out with that. How about beginning with how it is that I’m sitting here able to talk to you, when I know I’ve been stabbed through the heart, fractured my skull, and suffered God knows what other injuries, after being shoved off a cliff? Shall we try that one for starters?”

“Of course, but you’ve already been to the waystation, haven’t you?” she asked, frowning.

“Yes, but I’m none the wiser for it. Gods of chaos and destiny I know about, but why me? What’s so special about me?”

Kylah stood and went to fetch a condensation-smeared jug, out of which she poured two glasses of water. She handed Matt one and then turned away to put the jug back. She delivered her next line with her back towards him, so that he didn’t have to see her face.

“I will tell you, of course. But if you want, I can slip on the pentrievant right now and let you forget all about this.” She turned back, her eyes big ovals of doubt. “Let you get back to your career.”

Matt let out a derisive little laugh. “My career? For the last two years, my career, together with the rest of my life, has been sitting in the water at the bottom of the toilet bowl waiting for someone to pull the chain. All courtesy of the lovely Silvy, I may add. Let’s get one thing straight; I don’t want to go back to anything. I want to go forward, okay?”

Matt glanced at the glass of water in his hand with renewed suspicion.

“It’s okay,” Kylah said, and smiled. It was wry tinged with teasing. “There’s nothing in it except fresh snowmelt. Comes straight from a mountain near where I live. It’s very refreshing.” She sipped hers and let her eyes drop. “You do deserve an explanation. It’s the very least we can do, after what you did.” Her gaze came back up and there was no doubt about it this time; there was a kind of reluctant tenderness around her mouth and eyes. “Not many people would have risked everything to come back and help us like that. And I don’t know anyone who would have stood up to a Ghoulshee high priest and announced that his belief system was bollocks. You certainly knew how to put it to the instrument of Cthran.”

“I was invisible,” Matt said.

“Even if you were invisible, you had a choice. At the waystation, you could have gone anywhere you liked, but you came back for us.” She held his gaze, her laser eyes monitoring his, right to left. “Why did you do that, Matt?”

“You say I could have gone anywhere, but I couldn’t.” As a neat deflection of her question, his bluff only managed to nudge it a degree or two off course. Kylah used her unyielding gaze to bring it back on target.

“No?”

Matt reverted to his usual defence; if in doubt, flannel. “I mean, there wasn’t that much choice. Not really.”

Of course that was complete pigswill, because there had been a huge selection of choices on offer—Vietlombardia with Rimsplitter, for one. But somehow, it was the truth, too. There really hadn’t been a choice for any right-minded person who thought that he might make a difference. Even if that difference was the equivalent of one-tenth of a millilitre of spit in the vastness of the Pacific.

“It is possible to take this self-effacing act a touch too far, you know,” Kylah said in a schoolmistress-peering-through-her-half-moon-glasses-at-him sort of way. “I mean, coming back is not what most people would have done under the circumstances. Not in a million years.”

Mat shrugged. It was a good shrug, too. All it was missing was a beret, a stripy shirt and a Gauloise cigarette. Of course, he couldn’t tell her the real reason. That would mean baring his soul, and he wasn’t quite up to that yet. Just like a four-year-old novice with a yellow belt in karate wasn’t quite up to splitting a breezeblock in half with a hand chop, much as he’d like to have a go. Still, the shrug seemed to satisfy her, even if the narrowing of her eyes said that the effect was likely to be temporary.

Finally, when it was obvious he wasn’t going to be any more forthcoming, she sighed and pressed on. “My uncle, as you can see, needs a bit of looking after.”

Matt nodded. As understatements went, “bit of looking after” was a good one.

“The trouble is, he’s stubborn,” Kylah continued. “He enjoys his little walks. He likes his little luxuries, mainly Mrs. Hoblip’s tea and Hendrick’s and tonic with cucumber. But the reason he lives here is that he can still walk the streets without fear of attack. And he can do all that because of who he is.”

“And who exactly is he?”

“The Doorkeeper.”

“You already said that.”

“I know, but perhaps its significance escaped you,” Kylah explained. “If the Ghoulshee had succeeded in killing him—and they could have, because they have designed weapons for that purpose—it would have been apocalyptic for your world and ours. You’ve seen what they’re capable of.”

“I have, indeed,” Matt agreed. If he ever got to be on Mastermind, Ghoulshee cultural mores could now be his specialist subject. But Kylah chose to slather his earnest agreement with an extra splodge of accusatory barbecue sauce.

“Of course,” she busied herself with a paper clip. “I almost forgot how capable the delicious Silvy was. But now that you’ve experienced her cruelty firsthand, the fact that you’ve slept with her must make you feel terrible.”

There were two answers to that one. Matt decided on the more appropriate of the two, under the circumstances, and fibbed with a sage, exaggerated nod.

“Apocalyptic is a word I don’t use lightly, either,” Kylah went on. “You see, my uncle has four brothers, one of whom is my dad. They’ve all been around for a very long time.”

“How long?”

“Since forever.”

“So, a long time, then,” Matt said. But then he read the patient look on Kylah’s face. “You actually mean forever, don’t you?”

“They’re immortals, Matt. Common to all worlds. They appear in most religious texts in one form or another. With us, it’s a benevolent interpretation. We have a light giver, a spirit healer, the balancer, and harmony—that’s Dad. The Bronze Age version your lot prefer features them, too. Plague, war, famine—”

“The four horsemen?” Matt gaped.

“Yes. Uncle Ernest is the fifth.”

“Shit,” Matt said. He almost slapped his forehead. Five horses. Of course, it was a play on words. Hippo meaning horse and sync, which, he assumed was an adulteration of cinque, meaning five in all sorts of languages. His only excuse for not working this out earlier was that he’d had quite a lot on his mind.

“He lives here because he is the guardian of the way. For some reason, he likes Oxford. Something to do with all that lopsided intellect surrounding him. Seeing a palaeontology professor in shorts on a tricycle pedaling up Park Street makes Uncle Ernest feel as if he’s not so much on the edge of society, after all. But it’s his presence that keeps the barriers up. We, the SES, are permanently garrisoned to look after him. So, the fact that you saved him means that we owe you a very, very big one. Officially, there’s a ticker-tape parade scheduled back home, as well as half a dozen medals, but I did warn them that you might not…” Her lip curled up.

Despite the fact that Matt was still trying, with difficulty, to assimilate this new package of synapse-frying information, his automatic refusal-to-involve-himself-in-any-fuss alarm was still on full alert. “No thanks,” he said. “I don’t do mass adulation.”

“Just as I thought. So, that brings us back to the point of ‘Why you?’”

Matt looked out into the waning afternoon light. Rimsplitter was tearing something with a long tail to shreds with his talons and beak, a look of pure delight on his face.

“We captured a couple of Ghoulshee guards and managed to get them to cooperate,” Kylah continued. “They’re cocky bastards, but we have our ways and means.”

“Unpleasant?”

“They have this thing about noise. A couple of hours of Pan Pipes do Prog Rock generally does the trick. So, yes, unpleasant. Anyway, of the things we’ve learned, quite a lot of them were about you.”

“Me?”

“The best way I can put it is that you’re that elusive missing sock that turns up in a leg of the jeans after the next wash, Matt. Over the last two years, we’ve had several reports of suspicious incursions from operatives in the medical field, specifically in the medical records departments of hospitals and GP practices. There’s a particular breed of imp that loves going into those places and losing vital reports, or swapping labels.”

“There must have been a plague of the buggers in the General, then,” Matt said.

“They’re a nuisance,” Kylah agreed. “But these incursions were different. They were systematic. Now we know that the Ghoulshsee were looking for something…or rather, someone.”

“Anyone we know?” Matt asked.

The silent look he got back was answer enough.

“Me?” Matt was unable to stop his voice from going soprano.

“This isn’t easy, Matt. You father was an accountant from Cornwall, yes?”

Matt nodded.

“And his father?”

“A tin miner.”

“What do you know about their family histories?”

Matt shrugged. “I’m the youngest of our bunch. My mum and dad were getting on when they had me; Dad was in his forties. He was the last of his lot, too, and he died last year before he got to seventy, but as for the lot before him, I didn’t know them at all.”

He’d seen old posed sepia photographs of his grandfather on his great-grandmother’s knee. Her in a long dress and a high collar, him in knee britches and boots with a face as long as Red Rum’s on account of having to dress up and sit quietly while someone with a camera the size of a fridge told him to hold still for four minutes.

Kylah got up and retrieved a rolled-up bit of parchment, tied with string, from the filing cabinet. “I’ve had the backroom boys draw this up.” She undid the string and flattened the parchment on the desk.

Matt stared at it, recognition dawning on his face. “My family tree? But this goes back hundreds of years.”

“They are thorough, I’ll give them that.”

“Bloody hell, does that say ‘hanged for stealing a turnip’?”

“Yes, it does. But it was the pig that did it. It’s the three generations before you that you need to concentrate on.”

Matt ran his finger back up the tree and found his great-grandfather. Widowed at thirty-five, he had married again, and it was this second marriage that Matt was descended from.

“Did you know that your great-grandfather had some gypsy blood?” Kylah asked.

“No, but that does explain my father’s fixation with caravans,” Matt muttered. “The number of miserable summers I spent trundling up and down the M5 in a clapped-out Vauxhall, hoping the damned thing wouldn’t stall on a hill, you would not believe.”

“Your great-grandmother had some secrets, too.” Kylah lassoed Matt’s thoughts and brought them gently back to the point in question. “She’d had three children before she met your great-grandfather and never told him.”

“How do you know that?”

“We asked her this morning,” Kylah said.

“Oh yeah?” Matt said with a sceptical little laugh. But when he looked up at Kylah, she was not smiling, and the laugh petered out into a loud swallow.

“Two of those children were boys, and your grandfather was one of six, five of them also boys.”

“Right,” said Matt not knowing where all this was leading. “So I’ve got a couple of long-lost great-uncles somewhere.” A panicky thought struck him. “Don’t tell me that you and I are related somewhere along this line?”

“No, it’s nothing like that,” Kylah stayed in breaking-it-to-him-gently mode. “Your father had a big family, too, didn’t he?”

“He certainly did. One of nine,” Matt said. He paused to let the tiny light of understanding flare into a flickering flame. “Oh, I see what this is. And yes, he was a seventh son, but his father—”

“Was a seventh son, too. But, of course, he had no idea. Neither did you, until now.”

“Wow,” Matt said. “Families, eh?” He still had no idea where this was all leading, but it was beginning to feel like there might be a flower bed and a rhubarb patch around the next corner, and possibly a nice gazebo at its end.

Kylah kept looking at him, saying nothing.

“What?” Matt said, almost managing to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “I mean, it’s interesting, yes, but I’m one of five. I have three brothers and a sister. Even if the seventh son thing is somehow significant, it doesn’t apply to me. How can it?”

Kylah gave him a sympathetic little smile and perched on the edge of the desk, her eyes suddenly interested in her feet, her mouth becoming wafers of amusement.

“Will you stop it with those funny little smiles?” he said, and glared at her.

“The Ghoulshee have soothsayers, Matt. They’d predicted that a Mora, one of their words for a powerful wind, would bring death and destruction in 2014. But they also knew that this Mora would take the form of a being, and that it would come from the human world, not the Fae.”

Kylah pointed to the parchment and to the name Alice Danmor, Matt’s mother. Beneath were the five siblings that made up Matt’s family, but at the very beginning, and between the fifth and Matt, the sixth, were spaces filled with a faint symbol. Three faint symbols, in all.

“Your mother had five children, yes, but she had three miscarriages, two of them before she had your eldest brother. All three of those miscarriages were male foetuses.”

The world tilted on its axis again.

This was insane. This was even more insane than all the insane things he’d experienced so far. Insane cubed, in fact. His mother had never said anything to him about having had miscarriages. But why should she have? They were a big, healthy family. She was not the type to casually bring up her obstetric history over the Weetos at breakfast. Even so, this was all a bit much.

Kylah read his mind. Her smile was all sympathy. “If you ask your sister, she’ll no doubt confirm it. Mothers tend to confide in daughters much more than in sons about this sort of stuff.”

Matt sighed. “So, let me get this straight. I’m the seventh son of the seventh son of a seventh son?”

Kylah nodded. “Ad nauseam; you’re the Ghoulshee’s Mora. You must know the implications?”

Matt made a face. “Only that it’s twaddle.”

“The kind of twaddle that appears in every religion in every culture of about a thousand universes. The seventh son is variously known as ‘the healer,’ the ‘maker of things,’ endowed with gifts of ‘second sight,’ ‘predicting the future,’ or ‘luck.’ In short, a seventh son is a divine one who has a special purpose in life.”

Matt shook his head. “Like I said, twa—”

Kylah cut him off. “Those incursions into medical records departments? The Ghoulshee were looking for you. Or rather, your mother. Someone with a surname like yours who had records of giving birth to lots of children. They’re patient, too. Reports go back thirty years. It was only a matter of time until they hit paydirt.”

Matt went back to the parchment. The writing was pretty small, and there was a lot of it. The dates on the left-hand side went back a very, very long way. “Surely, these dates are wrong?” he asked, squinting to make them out.

“No,” Kylah said. “They go right back to the first great migrations. In fact, they go back to when other things paid rent on this green and sceptred isle.” She dropped her voice. “Some of them even refused to move out when the humans moved in.”

“Bloody squatters,” Matt said.

Kylah nodded. “All a bit too much fun to give up when you’re a god of chaos. Seeing those upright monkeys reacting to random events was entertainment like they’d never seen. And then, of course, the inevitable happened. One of them fell for a human.” Kylah glanced at Matt and then busied herself rolling up the parchment. “Take it from me, a goldfish impression isn’t a good look for you, Matt.”

Matt shut his mouth and took the second glass of water Kylah offered. He drank in silence.

“Quite a bit to take in all at once, isn’t it?” she observed.

Matt didn’t know whether to nod or shake his head. “But what, exactly, does all this make me?”

“Luck, fate, charm, karma, call it whatever you like. It’s already out there, of course, like the air we breathe. Little pockets of it wafting about, waiting for us to stumble into them. For the majority of punters, it’s completely random access, and when it turns out well it’s good luck, but it could just as easily be bad. It seems you attract those pockets like moths to a flame, Matt. And what’s more, it seems you can make them do whatever you want. That’s what you are. A conduit for whim. That’s what Silvy was testing you for with the iron charm. With it on, with the exposed iron on the rim next to your skin, you were projecting unchanneled chaos onto yourself—in a very limited way, of course. All that bad luck was self-induced. Of course, over here your power has limited efficacy, but in the Fae world, it’s a very different cauldron of cod.”

“So, does that mean—”

“That you can do anything you want? Probably.” Kylah offered up a pensive pout. “These are uncharted waters, as far as we’re concerned. It’s a question of learning on the job, I’d say.”

Matt’s thoughts were doing a fair impression of a dog chasing its tail. “But I’ve never been lucky at anything,” he protested.

“Really? Wasn’t everything going well before you met Silvy?”

“Well, yes, I suppose it was.”

Kylah’s shrug dripped with “there you are, then,” but she apparently wasn’t finished. “The Ghoulshee were trying to get rid of you, Matt, but you survived all their attempts. Even the pendant couldn’t quite quash all that karma of yours. But they also had a fallback plan. A way of turning you against yourself.”

“The weir?”

“The weir.” Kylah nodded. “We also found traces of something else on the pendant. It’s a particularly nasty little potion. A kind of self-destruct poison known as suicider on the black market. While you wore the pendant, it leached out, trying to get you to kill yourself. But even that couldn’t quite break your lucky streak.”

Matt blew out air. It was as if he’d just come off an attempt at a world record for number of revolutions on a roundabout in ten minutes. “It’s all a bit much to absorb,” he managed to mumble.

“You have a very dangerous gift,” Kylah said, making her eyes large and questioning. “My offer with the pentrievant is still on the table, if you want.”

Matt shook his head, but it was sorely tempting. Maybe muddling along as a porter at the general was safer than Ghoulshee incursions and blokes in black capes with yellow eyes. But that would mean not seeing Kylah again. He pushed the thought to the back of his mind and came up with another question.

“Does the seventh-son thing explain my being able to travel between worlds?”

“I would think so. Head office hasn’t quite got that one sorted yet, though.”

Matt thought for a moment. It only hurt a little. “What if I said I definitely don’t want to go back to things the way they were? What then?”

“We’d love to have you.” Kylah beamed. “The Ghoulshee are just one of many little thorns in our side. Your gift would be a pretty major coup for us.”

“So I’d be a superhero?”

Kylah tilted her head and frowned. “I can’t see you in a cape, underpants and tights, in all honesty. We see your role more in intelligence, but with a hands-on option, if needed.”

“Is that a job offer?” Matt asked.

Kylah smiled. “Think about it; that’s all we’re asking.”

“Oh, I will,” Matt said, sipping the water, which was still as cold as the moment he’d been given it. The brain freeze that followed focused his thoughts. He looked at Kylah and she looked back. Now might be the right moment. “It’s just that—”

Almost on cue, there was a tapping on the window. They looked up to see an ugly redheaded vulture with the back end of a half-eaten rat dangling from its beak. Matt’s focus changed like someone pressing the TV clicker to a different channel.

“And, of course, there’s him,” he said.

“Don’t you think he’s a bit unstable?” Kylah asked. “I mean, he’s a class-A sociopath, unbelievably sexist, and has an ego the size of a small country.”

“There’s a job for him in politics, then,” Matt said with a grin.

“I’m serious.” Kylah wasn’t smiling.

“He’s Rimsplitter,” Matt replied with resignation, “which is probably a psychiatric category all of its own. But he did play his part in what happened today. Without him, I wouldn’t have done what I did. He’s already in the witness protection programme, I know, but he deserves some recognition. And maybe a change of direction.”

Kylah shook her head. “We can’t give him human form. He has so many bad habits, his enemies will spot him a mile off if we put him on two legs.”

“I was thinking of something a little less ignoble than a vulture, that’s all.”

“I’m sure we can come to some arrangement.” Kylah looked at the vulture and shut her eyes in disgust. “You’re sure about this?”

“Not in the slightest,” Matt said, “but I owe him. We all do.”

Kylah smiled at the vulture and waved. Out of the corner of her mouth, she said, “Gratitude can sometime be the most difficult of graces.”

Matt nodded. “So, what now?”

“Now, you have a cooling-off period,” she said, collecting the water glasses and making herself suddenly busy. “Go away and think about what I’ve said. But you also need to understand that, if you wanted to go back to university and finish your training, it would be fine. Or there’s always the pentrievant.” She turned and her smile seemed a tad too bright. “Any time you want, we can wipe all of this from your memory and you could go back to being good old Mathew Danmor.”

Matt tried to see what lay behind her expression. It was softer than it used to be. But that little hint of irony colouring her phrasing was there still, and, so help him, Matt couldn’t tell if it was a challenge or not. He groaned inwardly; he’d always been hopelessly dyslexic when it came to female subtext. Exhaustion pressed down on him like a lead blanket. His brain hurt. Resurrection certainly took it out of you.

“I think I’d better lie down,” he said. “Somewhere warm and a long way away from here. Any chance I could borrow your Aperio?”

He had no way of knowing if the handle would work on the flap of a tent. Nor had he any right to assume that the tent would be there at all, since he’d packed the thing away into his backpack in the winter of ’04. So there was no earthly reason for a tent to be pitched on an Alpine meadow near the western slopes of Arthur’s Pass on New Zealand’s South Island. But there it was, in twenty-one degrees of heat, well-stocked with cold beers and chicken for barbecuing. Luck was a very weird thing, indeed.

There was plenty of roadkill for Rimsplitter, too, down in the valley, and Matt didn’t see much of him all day as he snoozed in the warm afternoon sun. That evening, he walked a high ridge, and though it was midsummer in the Southern hemisphere, he saw no one. He didn’t even hear a single plane or car. He was in his sleeping bag by ten, exhausted. He dreamt dreams that were full of horrible snake-headed priests and bloodthirsty acolytes, not to mention dreadful battles and bloodshed and five apocalyptic horsemen who rode the sky. When he awoke, Matt sensed that it had been more than just a dream. It had been a warning of how things might have turned out. Stretching in the bright sunshine, he wasn’t sure if the sweaty brow he’d woken up with was from relief or sheer terror.

As Matt cooked bacon on the Primus stove, Rimsplitter landed with his usual lack of grace and waddled over to where Matt was sitting.

“Okay,’s warm and there’s lots of food and there’s some cheeky-looking female parrots about, but it isn’t exactly my idea of a bleedin’ activity holiday.”

“That’s the point,” Matt said, cracking an egg into the pan. “I need solitude and tranquility. A bit of breathing space.”

“Yeah, well, there’s enough effin’ breathin’ space ’ere for the Red bleedin’ army.”

Matt sipped hot sweet tea and ignored Rimsplitter’s moaning. “I came here in my gap year. I was eighteen. I thought I could change the world.”

“I got news for you, mate. You bleedin’ can.”

Matt nodded. “Yeah, funny that. Now that I know I can, I don’t know if I want to.”

“What the eff does that mean? You can do anythin’ you want. If you robbed a bank, I expect there’d be a faulty alarm button under the effin’ teller’s desk. Or you could have a threesome with some Brazilian pole dancers and not bleedin catch anythin’.” There was something in the way Rimsplitter cringed when he spoke of the pole dancers that suggested more recollected regret than imagination.

Matt stopped chewing his bacon sandwich to consider Rimsplitter. “It’s at times like these when we find out how little we have in common.”

“Come on, you ponce. You’re the luckiest bee in the world. Comin’ ’ere trying to find yourself. ’S all bollocks. You know what my old ’Ungarian granddad used to say? If you talk to God, it’s praying. If God talks to you, it’s bleedin’ schizophrenia.”

Matt almost choked on his tea. “Rimsplitter, that’s almost profound.”

“No, it’s somethin’ he used to say over and over. Even when they took him away in the ambulance he was sayin’ it. But ’e was right. There’s no bleedin’ answer ’ere. It’s all effin’ ahead of you, mate.”

“Maybe. But I need a bit more time. Clear my head.”

“Yeah, well, when you do arrive at your cosmic answer, just let me know. ’Cos I miss the effin’ action.”

“You miss Uzturnsitstan?”

“Not all of it, no.” Rimsplitter tilted his head, apparently pondering. There was a bit of congealed rabbit fur on his wattle. “Definitely not the poisonous frogs and the snakes and the flesh-eatin’ plants. And I can live without them Ghoulshee berks and the volcano. Oh, and the contaminated lake stinks and the salt desert is a bugger. You can effin’ keep them. But me mates, I miss them cees.”

Matt nodded. “Ever thought of working in the travel industry?”

On the second night, Matt’s dreams were just as vivid, but different. They weren’t so much about what might have happened as about what would, instead. In his dream, he was having tea with Mrs. Hoblip and had become fluent in Brownie throat clearing. She introduced him to her son, George, and when he’d got over that and steadied himself, he had an idea and discussed it with George at length. Then Birrik and Kemoch were disinterring bodies in a cemetery, and he took the opportunity to pick their jar-head brains about a few things. But although it was what he was longing for, he didn’t see Kylah once. She wasn’t answering her calls, it seemed. Either that, or he was on her blocked sender list.

The next morning, Matt got up and signalled to Rimsplitter.

“Come on, we’re off.”

“Somewhere with a bit of bleedin’ action, I hope?”

“New Thameswick,” Matt explained. “I need to do a little shopping. But first,” he added, sealing the tent flap before applying the Aperio, “we need to stop by the Holiday Inn.”

It turned out to be as easy as saying it. Matt applied the Aperio and thought about the lobby. A bit of him realised that, even in the rarefied atmosphere of inter-dimensional travel, what he was doing was pretty unusual, given the waystation’s stringently fatal entry criteria. But there was no need for deep analysis; it worked, and that was all he cared about.

“Why ’ere?” Rimsplitter grumbled as they stepped in through the lobby door.

“Bit of unfinished business, that’s all,” Matt explained.

“Yeah? Well, this place gives me the bleedin’ creeps.”

“Just wait here while I talk to the concierge.”

He left Rimsplitter brooding and made for reception. The man behind the desk almost fell over himself in his effort to be deferential as Matt approached.

“Ah, Mr. Danmor. A pleasure to see you again, sir.”

“You’ve had instructions, I take it?”

“Yes, sir. Room four. On the ground floor.”

Matt took the offered brass key and held it dangling from his hand as he went back to the vulture.

“Woss that for?”

“We’ve had special dispensation,” Matt explained.

“Isn’t that a big word for a bung?”

Matt ignored him and walked to door number four. He unlocked it and held it open for the vulture. Rimsplitter muttered as he hopped past. “Went through room eight the first time I came ’ere. Walked in a bloke, came out a bleedin’ vulture. It’s bleedin’ sp—”

Matt waited until the vulture was fully inside and then shut the door, locked it and put the key on the floor. He waved at the concierge, who waved back with the enthusiasm of a demented four-year-old. Matt took the lift to the 123rd floor and headed for door number 97. Five minutes later, he was on the ground floor of Herod’s, making a purchase.

Afterwards, he stopped by Harpy Nix to say “thank you.” To say the welcome he received was effusive would be pushing things, but from the nod of the head he got from the salesman, the general impression he gained was that the feedback had been appreciated. Ten minutes later, he was back outside room four at the Holiday Inn, inserting the key.

“All done?” he asked the concierge.

“We trust it is to your satisfaction, sir.” The man beamed as he said it.

Matt opened the door.

“—ooky, that’s what it is.” Rimsplitter paused and turned to look at Matt. He had a smelling-a-rat expression on his avian face. Nothing new in that, since smelling rats was one of his chief hobbies. “Ain’t you comin’ in?”

“I’ve been.”

“What you talkin’ about?” Rimsplitter squawked his way back out in double-quick time. “You won’t catch me goin’ anywhere in this effin’ place alone. No bleedin’ way.”

“Fine,” Matt said, staring at Rimsplitter.

“Why are you smiling like that?”

“Oh, it’s your wattle. Looking a bit pale, I thought.”

“Is it?” Rimsplitter hissed in frozen panic. “Funny you should say that, ’cos I’m not quite feelin’ me bleedin’ self.”

He trotted over to the black marble pillar to peer at his reflection, muttering as he went.

“Been feelin’ a bit off colour to tell you the truth. Maybe I’m coming down with som…WHOA…WHAT THE EFFIN’ EFF!”

The spluttering roar that escaped his beak made the foyer chandelier tinkle ominously and attracted a glare of supernova proportions from the grey-suited concierge. Matt watched with high amusement as Rimsplitter furled and unfurled his wings, which was no easy task since they now had a span of over six feet. He looked at himself and let out a long, low whistle as his talons scraped the stone floor, before turning a pair of sharp, almost black eyes towards Matt.

“I’m an effin’ eagle,” he said in the harshest of whispers.

“Hope you like it,” Matt said.

“Like it? What is there not to like? Look at this plumage! Not overstated. Black and white with a touch of effin’ grey. Very classy. Plus, I got me own effin’ ’eaddress. I’m an eagle, that’s wot I am. An effin’ eagle!”

He started hopping from one leg to another before segueing into a moonwalk.

“A crowned eagle, actually,” Matt said. “Top of the cool raptors list.”

“The girls’ll be beating down the doors to me effin’ nest. Ha! Wait ’til that ponce Jeremy sees this.” “I’m pleased you like it,” Matt said. Rimsplitter stopped and swivelled his head towards Matt.

“Thanks, mate. I mean it.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Matt said. But he left it at that. You don’t hug crowned eagles, and you certainly do not shake hands with them. Not if you want to keep all your fingers.

“But what about you? What are you goin’ to get out of all this?” Rimsplitter said in a disquieting ejaculation of concern.

“That depends.”

“On effin’ what?”

“On a little bit of luck,” Matt said, leaving Rimsplitter to ponder. Matt refused to be drawn in further. Instead, they went back to Arthur’s Pass so that Rimsplitter could do some test flights and get used to his new manifestation, decimating the rabbit population in the process. But Matt didn’t linger. With a wave to the soaring eagle, he turned the onyx handle once more and exited through the tent flap, driven by the need to tie up a few last dangling loose ends.